[iwar] [fc:Fourth.Generation.Warfare.-.Background.Reading]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-05 20:08:14
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:FCC.OKs.Delayed.Deployment.Plans.for.E-911]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:FBI.Investigates.School.Bomb.Threats]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200110060308.UAA26337@big.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 20:08:14 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Fourth.Generation.Warfare.-.Background.Reading]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Date: October 4, 2001 Subject: #429 - Fourth Generation Warfare -
Background Reading =====================================
[Comment #: 429 ] Discussion Thread - Comment #s - #427, 278, 174, 171,
170 URLs for Past Comments are Archived at 2 Locations: - Defense &amp;
National Interest Website: http://www.d-n-i.net/ - Chronological
Archive: http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/cspinney/

Attached References: [1] David Wood, "War On Terror Pits Networks Of
Cells Against Bureaucracies," Newhouse News Service, October 4, 2001

[2] John Omicinski (Gannett News Service), "Analysis: Terror attack
sends American into 'fourth generation of warfare,'" Greenville News,
September 26, 2001.

[3] Elaine M. Grossman, "Key Review Offers Scant Guidance On Handling
'4th Generation' Threats,"Inside The Pentagon, October 4, 2001 Pg. 1.

For a compendium of articles describing different aspects of Fourth
Generation War, see - http://www.d-n-i.net/FCS_Folder/fourth_generation_warfare.htm

=======================================
When President Bush declared war on the al Qaeda network, he
acknowledged tacitly that the United States was embroiled in what has
been sometimes called a Fourth Generation War (4GW) - the kind of war
the techno-visioneers, the contractors, and the $345 billion dollar
defense budget had little use for, prior to the 9-11 Atrocity.

This aim of this blaster is to provide you with several different albeit
complimentary perspectives on 4GW. Immediately below is a short op-ed
introducing the subject, written by Professor Harold Gould and myself.
Dave Wood and John Omicinski, two excellent defense reporters, expand
the discussion in References 1 &amp; 2, and in Reference 3, the Elaine
Grossman, another fine reporter, describes how the much-ballyhooed
Quadrennial Defense Review -- the so called roadmap into the 21st
Century -- paid lip service to 4GW, notwithstanding the fact that it
went to press after Mr. Bush declared war on the al Qaeda network.

New generation of war changes the paradigm BY HAROLD GOULD AND FRANKLIN
SPINNEY The Virginian Pilot, October 3, 2001, pg. B9.

What has been called Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) has now come of
age. The assaults on the twin towers and the Pentagon prove there's no
place to hide if suicide attackers are willing to die for their
appointed cause.

By declaring war on the al-Qaeda network of terror -- a non-state global
phenomenon -- America and the nation-state system formally recognized
this new era. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ended the wars of
religion known as The 30 Years War. The state acquired a monopoly on the
use of organized violence.

Since then, three generations of war evolved out of the violent clashes
of nations: classical nation-state war culminating in the Napoleonic
Wars; the industrial wars of attrition (the American Civil War through
World War I); and maneuver warfare that emerged in some countries after
World War I. 4GW has changed everything. It pits nations against
non-national organizations and networks -- including oppressed ethnic
groups, mafias, narco-traffickers and extremist quasi-relgious cults.

4GW is the chosen weapon of the weak, the downtrodden, the criminal, and
the fanatic. Its evolutionary roots may lie in guerrilla warfare, the
Leninist theory of insurrection, and old fashioned terrorism, but it is
rendered more pervasive by the technologies that the age of computers
and mass communication has spawned.

New and in some instances very unpleasant scenarios must be put in place
to deal with a world in which there are no havens no matter how innocent
the individual or how powerful the state.

The ubiquity of 4GW requires enormous changes in military capabilities
(training, doctrine, and weapons) as well as the very way we think about
national security.

No matter how many search-and-destroy missions are initiated against
``terrorist'' sites, no matter how many terrorist operatives are
targeted for assassination, terrorist planners and their weapon of
choice -- suicide bombers -- ceaselessly emerge. They invariably are
supported by rogue regimes led by kindred political monsters, to reap
their vengeance and havoc upon innocent civilians in coffee houses,
shopping centers, bus stops.

The United States has been victimized by the honing of 4GW tactics into
a grizzly art form. The playing field has been leveled by the capacity
of the self-styled oppressed to unleash sudden and remorseless violence
against the core institutions of established society.

The World Trade Center-Pentagon conspirators spent months matriculating
at U.S. pilot-training facilities, driving American rental cars and
eating American pizzas in preparation for their unspeakable deeds. What
is more, the process of infiltrating with subtlety and stealth earns the
perpetrators prestige and admiration in the eyes of their
``constituents.'' This plays in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Baghdad.

The challenge confronting America is how to deal with this fundamental
alteration in the rules of war. We will have to find a way to decisively
subdue a remorseless foe who believes that unlimited violence
unencumbered by pity or compassion is justified in the name of religious
rage. And we must do it without losing our own moral balance in the process.

This ugly reality means the promulgation of harsh measures in the short
run. As in any conflict, the military task is to disarm the enemy and
neutralize his offensive capability. But blind retaliatory force will
create more suicide bombers _ it will arm the enemy. Nevertheless, the
world's democracies must pool their resources to ferret out the cells of
fanatics who supply the brains and the resources to conduct Fourth
Generation Warfare.

Doing so obviously requires closer coordination of intelligence and
counter-terrorism resources than ever before. It requires superbly
trained warriors led by incorruptible officers carefully selected for
their imagination, moral character, courage and dedication to our
democratic ideals.

America and the West must address the sources of the anti-American,
anti-Western rage sweeping the post-colonial world. Measures must be
taken to alleviate the poverty, the lingering remnants of colonialism,
and the violations of human rights that sustain the ranks of the
miserable, the alienated, and the downtrodden. They are the raw material
upon which Fourth Generation Warfare feeds

--------------------------

Harold Gould is visiting professor of south Asian studies at the
University of Virginia. Franklin Spinney is a civilian in the Office of
the Secretary of Defense. The views expressed do not represent those of
the Department of Defense. ---------------------------



Chuck Spinney Archives of past commentaries or reports can be found at
Defense &amp; National Interest Website: http://www.d-n-i.net/ or Infowar at http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/cspinney/

[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.]

===========[ Reference #1] ===========&lt;

October 4, 2001 War On Terror Pits Networks Of Cells Against Bureaucracies

By David Wood, Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON -- In America's new war on terrorism, the latest round may
have gone to the United States: It has thrown the enemy off guard by
amassing a powerful retaliatory force and then ... waiting.

That's the kind of classic mental jujitsu that the nation will most need
in what promises to be a long and uncertain campaign. It leaves the
United States, not the terrorists, holding the initiative. And leaves
the bad guys to wait and worry -- what's up?

The tactic springs directly from the teachings of a legendary Air Force
fighter pilot and strategist named John Boyd, largely unknown outside
military circles. He helped birth a generation of unconventional
strategists -- including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of
State Colin Powell.

Boyd, a lanky cigar-chewing iconoclast who died in 1997, would have
described this campaign in terms of aerial maneuvering: When there's a
bandit on your tail, you have to turn tighter and faster -- and more
unpredictably -- in order to get him in your sights from behind.

That's just the kind of unpredictable, unconventional tactic that may be
difficult to sustain as America's ponderous Cold War bureaucracies crank
up for the counter-terror campaign. Most of what the United States
brings to the fight are federal agencies designed 50 years ago to
harness a massive industrial and military power to the struggle against
the Soviet Union.

"The United States still uses an industrial-age thought process -- our
adversaries have evolved to information-age processes, learning to get
inside the U.S. decision loop," said Air Force Brig. Gen. James B.
Smith, deputy commander of the U.S. Joint Warfighting Center in Suffolk, Va.

The terrorists linked to accused mastermind Osama bin Laden combine the
most advanced Western concepts of organizational behavior with ancient
tribal methods -- for transferring money, for instance -- according to
experts like the CIA's Robert Pillar, national intelligence officer for
the Near East.

Their form of organization -- loose, floating networks of temporary
cells -- enables them to seize the initiative rather than wait for and
respond to orders from above. They can draw the information and other
resources they need from the network, but act virtually independently --
stealthily and unpredictably.

In sharp contrast are the departments of Defense, State, Treasury,
Commerce and Transportation, the intelligence agencies and dozens of
others drafted into the war on terrorism.

Each is set up in tightly ranked, top-down hierarchies with a powerful
commander at the top. Each gathers and digests information and passes it
upward, and awaits orders that filter back down a chain of command. And
each jealously guards its own domain from encroachment by others.

Overseas operations are hampered from the outset because while
intelligence is gathered from agents working through the State
Department or the CIA, military action is controlled by one of four
regional military commanders who report back through the Pentagon.
Working jointly has always been a problem.

"What we have are `stovepipe' hierarchies and what we need are
networks," said one frustrated military official who asked not to be
identified. "We don't even have terminology for what we're trying to
talk about. What we need to do is outwit 'em."

That's where Boyd comes in.

In desperate aerial dogfights with North Korean and Chinese pilots
during the Korean War, Boyd learned that enemy MiG-15s could out-turn
and out-climb the principle American fighter, the F-86. But American
pilots were regularly smoking the MiGs.

The reasons were simple. The F-86's bubble cockpit gave its pilot
unequaled visibility. American pilots also could move their control
sticks a fraction easier and faster. After a dozen twists and turns,
this advantage would accumulate so that a crafty American pilot could
maneuver himself into a firing position behind the enemy.

From that experience Boyd developed a theory of warfighting that
centered not on destroying all the enemy's weapons or cities, but on
getting inside what Boyd called his "decision loop."

"The ability to operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than an adversary,"
he wrote, "enables one to fold an adversary back inside himself so that
he can neither appreciate nor keep up with what's going on." If the
military maximizes its stealth and speed of maneuver, he asserted, the
enemy "will become disoriented or confused."

Dubbed "Genghis John" for his uncompromising zeal, Boyd condensed his
theories into a series of detailed briefings which drew on physics,
logic, cultural anthropology and ethics, and he buttonholed anyone who
would listen -- scientists, generals, reporters, academics and
politicians, including a young congressman named Dick Cheney.

Boyd's briefings were legendarily intense. The ex-fighter jock would
occasionally erupt in cackles of laughter, and gesticulate madly with
his face inches from his listeners, spraying them with saliva and
billows of smoke from his ever-present cigarillo.

During one presentation, the "Mad Colonel" accidentally burned a hole in
a general's tie.

The brass hated Boyd as a heretic, tapped his phones and tried to
suppress his ideas. But his lessons took root in a younger generation.

"I was in awe of him," said retired Gen. Charles C. Krulak, who later
became commandant of the Marine Corps. "He was a towering intellect" and
had "a fundamental impact" on military technology and theory.

For example in 1990, Cheney's aides say, Boyd's thinking helped
then-Defense Secretary Cheney reject a plan for a frontal assault on
Iraqi troops during the Gulf War. Instead, he approved an audacious idea
for a "left hook," taking the Iraqis by surprise. The tactic enabled the
Americans to get inside the Iraqis' decision loop and to stay there
until the foe collapsed and gave up.

Powell, who also absorbed Boyd's ideas, used his language in recent
statements which he talked about the need to get inside the terrorists'
"decision loop."

How to do that?

Intelligence data, rather than being kept within channels, might be
widely shared so that fresh eyes could see patterns invisible to others.

"You speed up your decision loop by being open," said Chuck Spinney, a
senior Pentagon analyst and Boyd disciple. "You get a lot of people with
very different perspectives coming at the problem."

Another unconventional idea is to use what military officers call
"effects-based operations." For instance, if a goal is to erode bin
Laden's base of support, a massive effort to feed, house and support
Afghan refugees would work better than attacking suspected camps with
cruise missiles -- even if launching missiles is easier and quicker.

Supporting refugees would demonstrate American generosity and moral
superiority -- and show up bin Laden as an unfeeling cheapskate.

"You focus on effect, not the medium, which means you can utilize the
full range of our national capabilities" including diplomatic and
financial, said Brig. Gen. Smith. "The `system' that we have now is too
large, unwieldy, and complex to respond effectively or initiate the
changes that are needed," Grant Hammond, professor of international
relations at the U.S. Air War College, wrote last year. "Revolution is required."



===========[ Reference #2] ===========&lt;

Analysis: Terror attack sends American into 'fourth generation of
warfare' By John Omicinski (Gannett News Service), Greenville News,
September 26, 2001.

WASHINGTON - Just before he hung up his Marine Corps uniform, his four
bright stars and retired, Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke at a U.S. Naval
Institute dinner about the world ahead facing his son, a newly minted
Marine second lieutenant.

Little did Zinni appreciate his prescience.

"On his watch," said Zinni, "my son is likely to see a weapon of mass
destruction event. Another Pearl Harbor will occur in some city,
somewhere in the world where Americans are gathered ... it will forever
change him and his institutions.

"At that point," Zinni said, "all the lip-service paid to dealing with
such an eventuality will be revealed for what it is."

American military institutions and attitudes were poorly equipped
psychologically or bureaucratically, to respond to an urban Pearl
Harbor, he said. They were so antiquated that "Napoleon could reappear
today and recognize my Central Command staff."

Now, the terrorist attacks on America Sept. 11 have summarily thrust the
antique U.S. military-diplomatic establishment into the era of a "fourth
generation of warfare." It is a historic turn that a small cadre of
futurist civilians and officers have been warning their superiors to
take seriously since before the end of the Cold War.

"The fourth-generation battlefield," said two Marine officers, two Army
officers and a civilian in the seminal 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article
that coined the term, "is likely to include the whole of the enemy's society."

The article, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,"
reads like a rough film script for the terrorists' stunning attacks on
New York and Washington with hijacked jets, killing at least 6,823
people, many of them sitting peacefully at their desks, most of them civilians.

"The distinction between 'civilian' and 'military' may disappear," said
the article. "Television news may become a more powerful operational
weapon than armored divisions."

Osama bin Laden's terror war on the United States fits perfectly into
the fourth-generation matrix.

"There's no distinction now between combatants and non-combatants," said
Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon air warfare analyst and an expert on modern
war. "He's bypassing our big military and will try to conquer our will
to resist.

"His aims are relatively clear. He wants us out of Saudi Arabia and
wants Israel to disappear. He wants us to become so terrorized we'll go neutral."

For 500 years the West has defined warfare, but the authors of the
article on fourth-generation warfare wrote with piercing foresight that
the new look "may emerge from non-Western cultural traditions, such as
Islamic or Asiatic traditions."

In his book, "The Transformation of War," Martin van Creveld, one of the
gurus of a small cadre of fourth-generation warfare believers, wrote
that large nation-states rapidly are losing the monopoly on violence
they won centuries ago in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

He has had little luck - until now - convincing a military audience.

"For years on end," he said from his home in Israel, "the military have
been preparing for the wrong kind of war. Making the switch from
fighting against their own kind to combating a shadowy terrorist
organization that is everywhere and nowhere is neither easy nor cheap.
Therefore, their reluctance to listen is hardly surprising."

William Lind, a prime coiner of "fourth-generation warfare," says that
despite the Sept. 11 attacks, "I see not the slightest sign that anyone
in the Pentagon gets it. This is a crisis of the legitimacy of the state
- including the United States at a time when people are transferring
their allegiance to a wide variety of other things."

A former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, Lind heads the Center
for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.

Sept. 11, he said, made plain the biggest change in warfare since the
17th century.

The rise of the nation-state, with its top-down military structure,
armies of serfs and limited weapons, gave rise to first-generation
warfare. That ended with the early 19th century Napoleonic Wars.

The Civil War was the initial second-generation war, dominated by
artillery, repeating weapons, interchangeable parts, huge armies. Though
fought with mass-produced, lethal weapons made possible by the
Industrial Revolution, still-primitive tactics caused wholesale
slaughters in both the Civil War and World War I.

German generals in World War II perfected third-generation
shock-maneuver warfare because they needed a national strategy to
overcome their poor geographic position, flanked by enemies.

All the way to the Persian Gulf War, U.S. forces have been fighting
second- and third-generation wars, concepts well past their shelf lives.

"The only reason Desert Storm worked was because we managed to go up
against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to
confront us symmetrically," said Zinni, indicating wars henceforth will
be "asymmetrical" and require new thinking, new strategies.

"Grand strategy is very important now," said Marine Col. G. I. Wilson of
Camp Pendleton, Calif., a co-author of "Fourth Generation Warfare."

"Saudi Arabia's cutting ties with Afghanistan is the kind of event that
sends a phenomenal cultural and political message" in a
fourth-generation war, he said.

So, Operation Enduring Freedom won't be anything like Operation Desert Storm.

Those days are over, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sept. 27,
sounding like a fresh convert to fourth-generation warfare.

"This is a broad, sustained multifaceted effort that is notably
distinctively different from prior efforts. It is by its very nature
something that cannot be dealt with by some sort of massive attack or
invasion. It is a much more subtle, nuanced, difficult, shadowy set of
problems," he said.

- -

On the Web

www.proceedings.org/proceedings/articles00/prozinni.htm, Anthony Zinni
speech text

www.d-n-i.net, Defense and the National Interest site, which includes a
section on fourth-generation warfare

===========[ Reference #3] ===========&lt;

[Reprinted by Permission of Inside Washington Publishers: This article
may not be reproduced or redistributed, in part or in whole, without
express permission of the publisher. Copyright 2001, Inside Washington Publishers.]

News analysis

Key Review Offers Scant Guidance On Handling '4th Generation' Threats By
Elaine M. Grossman, Inside The Pentagon, October 4, 2001 Pg. 1

The Pentagon's report on the Quadrennial Defense Review, forwarded to
Congress late last week and released publicly Oct. 1, talks much of the
"transformation" the U.S. military must undergo to address what it terms
"asymmetric" threats, but offers little direction on how the services
might prevent or respond to so-called "fourth-generation warfare"
attacks of the kind seen Sept. 11.

One expert recently described this new generation as "all forms of
conflict where the other side refuses to stand up and fight fair."
Practitioners of this approach typically function outside any nation's
control and often operate across national boundaries, much as does
indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden and his loosely confederated al Qaeda
network implicated in the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC,
last month.

"The more successful terrorists appear to operate on broad mission
orders that carry down to the level of the individual terrorist,"
according to a prescient article in the October 1989 issue of the Marine
Corps Gazette, authored by military historian William Lind and four Army
and Marine officers. "The 'battlefield' is highly dispersed and includes
the whole of the enemy's society. The terrorist lives almost completely
off the land and the enemy. Terrorism is very much a matter of maneuver:
The terrorist's firepower is small, and where and when he applies it is critical."

The QDR was largely complete by the time terrorists hijacked four
commercial jetliners and used three of them as mass suicide bombs
against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the fourth was believed
en route to yet another target before it crashed in Pennsylvania.
Together the attacks have claimed more than 6,000 lives.

Pentagon officials say there was some thought given after the attacks to
putting off the QDR report, which was due to Congress Sept. 30, in order
to review in depth how the events of Sept. 11 should affect military
planning. But defense leaders decided instead to go forward on the
notion that the QDR already included attention to homeland defense,
asymmetric threats and potential surprises, and that references to the
terrorist attacks could be sprinkled throughout the existing draft text,
according to Pentagon officials.

"I'd love to put the 10 September version next to the 12 September
version and see what changed," said one military officer this week,
speaking on background.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's report declares in a foreword (which
the text, perhaps in haste to release the document, misspells) that
although there was little time to include in the QDR report lessons
drawn from last month's terrorism, "these attacks confirm the strategic
direction and planning principles that resulted from this review,
particularly its emphasis on homeland defense, on surprise, on preparing
for asymmetric threats, on the need to develop new concepts of
deterrence, on the need for a capabilities-based strategy, and on the
need to balance deliberately the different dimensions of risk."

The first chapter, entitled "America's Security in the 21st Century,"
mentions terrorist groups often "have the support of state sponsors or
enjoy sanctuary and protection of states, but some have the resources
and capabilities to operate without state sponsorship."

Yet the report lays out little guidance on crafting a response to this
brand of resourceful, shadowy and unconventional adversaries. The QDR
document does lay out four broad "defense policy goals":

* "Assuring allies and friends;

* "Dissuading future military competition;

* "Deterring threats and coercion against U.S. interests; [and]

* "If deterrence fails, decisively defeating any adversary."

These goals appear better aimed at preventing, or if necessary,
fighting, wars between traditional nation-states or coalitions. The
yardstick of preparing for two overlapping major wars, while somewhat
modified, remains central in the QDR.

But it is fair to ask whether suicide bombers -- on whatever scale --
can be "dissuaded" or "deterred," and it remains to be seen if they can
be defeated. In any case, the QDR report does not attempt to explore any
of the four goals in detail as they might apply to practitioners of
fourth-generation warfare.

Stephen Cambone, a defense policy official who played a key role in
organizing the QDR, was asked at an Oct. 2 Washington, DC, forum how the
United States could deter "an enemy who regards casualties as a mark of victory."

"I think the secretary has answered that question more than once,"
Cambone replied. "It's called 'persistence and resolve.'" He offered no
further explanation.

Rumsfeld has won kudos for a Sept. 27 New York Times opinion piece in
which he emphasizes that the war against terrorism will have no
traditional battlefield, no clear start date and no exit strategy. Nor
is the military the only -- or even necessarily the most important --
tool at the nation's disposal to fight this particular war, the defense
secretary wrote. "The public may see some dramatic military engagements
that produce no apparent victory, or may be unaware of other actions
that lead to major victories," according to the piece.

But insights such as these are found only in bits and pieces in the QDR
report, leading many observers to conclude that the review focused
little, if at all, on the issues raised by this new kind of conflict.

Yet in-depth consideration of these challenges has been ongoing for more
than a decade by at least a small group of defense thinkers.

The 1989 Gazette article, entitled "The Changing Face of War: Into the
Fourth Generation," says terrorism is not synonymous with
fourth-generation warfare, but that terrorists may employ elements of
this new approach. In fact, the emphasis on mission orders, dispersion,
maneuver, and collapsing the enemy internally are carryovers from what
the article describes as third-generation warfare, which was fully
utilized in World War II with the emergence of blitzkrieg.

Modern terrorism takes blitzkrieg's focus on cutting off the enemy from
the rear "a major step further" in its efforts to "bypass the enemy's
military entirely and strike directly at his homeland at civilian
targets," these forward-looking authors wrote. "Ideally, the enemy's
military is simply irrelevant to the terrorist." The article and others
on fourth-generation warfare will be reprinted in the November 2001
edition of the Gazette.

Fourth-generation warfare, stated the 1989 article, "will be nonlinear,
possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The
distinction between 'civilian' and 'military' may disappear. Actions
will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including
their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity."

According to a forthcoming article by one of the earlier Gazette
authors, Marine Corps Col. G.I. Wilson, along with two other experts,
"fourth-generation conflict is much more than terrorism [or] ethnic
conflict. . . . Competition for scare resources, proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction, crime, ethnic cleansing, ethnic riots and
genocide further complicate the horizon. These conflicts will continue
to include war between states and sub-national disputes. Indeed,
intrastate conflict can be expected to continue as the more frequent
form, frequently threatening to spill over borders and stimulate
regional violence."

"A determined opponent will not challenge strength but will seek [our]
weakness through alternative courses of action that have not been
properly addressed," says retired National Guard Brig. Gen. Dave
McGinnis. "More than one great military power has been defeated in this
way. The greater the military capability, it seems the more susceptible
these victims have been to such alternative measures. Now we are among them."

McGinnis told Inside the Pentagon that while he was serving in the
reserve affairs directorate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in
the mid-1990s, he co-authored an analysis that began with the question:
"How can a nation that has no air force strategically challenge the
American homeland and restrict our strategic maneuver?"

"It didn't take a lot of imagination," he said this week, "to discover a
wide range of options to do both, which [we] began to term 'cheap kills'
as a counter to our highly expensive [method] of creating military
power." The analysis argued for the retention of Air National Guard
squadrons that later provided the core air defense over more than 30
U.S. cities immediately after last month's attacks. But the study's
focus on potential U.S. vulnerabilities to creative threats was largely
disregarded at the time within the Pentagon, McGinnis says.

"We were literally laughed out of every office in the Pentagon,
including [the directorates for] strategy and program analysis and
evaluation," he told ITP.

The QDR report notes that the terrorist attacks "will require us to move
forward more rapidly" toward transformation in forces and operational
concepts to address new threats, but stops short of making any changes
to the size, composition or training of any military forces. Nor does
the QDR set any time lines for doing so, deferring any such decisions to
future studies and saying simply that "today's force structure . . . is
the baseline from which the department will develop a transformed force
for the future."

Rumsfeld has promised that the Pentagon's budget submission to Congress
for fiscal year 2003 early next year will reflect the results of
additional, in-depth studies beyond the QDR, but no date has been set
for the publication of any plan outlining the Bush administration's
approach to preventing or responding to terrorism.

"The military departments and defense agencies will develop
transformation road maps that specify time lines to develop
service-unique capabilities" necessary to meet six newly defined
operational goals, the QDR report states, but the document does not set
a due date for those road maps.

With the QDR, the Pentagon "restores the defense of the United States as
the department's primary mission," and the first among four criteria for
sizing military forces is the requirement to "defend the United States."
A senior defense official, in an Oct. 1 background briefing for
reporters on the QDR, said "that will be a task that will be in large
part taken up by the Guard and Reserve, but not entirely." Details are
left to a "comprehensive review" of active and reserve force issues
following the QDR.

On Oct. 2, the Pentagon named the Army secretary, Thomas White, to lead
the military's efforts in homeland security. Additionally, the QDR
document says the Defense Department "will review the establishment of a
new unified combatant commander to help address complex interagency
issues and provide a single military commander to focus military support."

But apart from saying the military will work with other federal
agencies, as appropriate, to prevent attacks on the U.S. homeland or
manage their consequences, the report offers little reassurance that the
QDR process involved a thinking through of these objectives.

Defending against attacks is broadly described: "As the tragic September
terror attacks demonstrate, potential adversaries . . . are placing
greater emphasis on the development of capabilities to threaten the
United States directly in order to counter U.S. operational advantages
with their own strategic effects," the QDR report states. "Therefore,
the defense strategy restores the emphasis once placed on defending the
United States and its land, sea, air and space approaches."

Yet when it comes to laying out the "pillars" required for transforming
the U.S. military to address future threats, the broad-brush
descriptions remain hazy on how military efforts will be focused on
countering a fourth-generation adversary:

* "Strengthening joint operations through standing joint task force
headquarters, improved joint command and control, joint training, and an
expanded joint forces presence policy;

* "Experimenting with new approaches to warfare, operational concepts
and capabilities, and organizational constructs such as standing joint
forces through wargaming, simulations and field exercises focused on
emerging challenges and opportunities;

* "Exploiting U.S. intelligence advantages through multiple intelligence
collection assets, global surveillance and reconnaissance, and enhanced
exploitation and dissemination; and

* "Developing transformational capabilities through increased and
wide-ranging science and technology, selective increases in procurement,
and innovations in DOD processes."

Although human intelligence is not explicitly cited as a pillar for
transformation, many government officials and outside experts have cited
the U.S. intelligence community's dearth of regional spies and
specialists as a key reason for the nation's failure to predict or
prepare for the possibility of the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed, traveling
in the Middle East this week, Rumsfeld said intelligence could play a
more prominent role than the military in undermining terrorist activities.

A need for better "HUMINT" in the military realm is affirmed by the QDR
in a section called "Exploiting Intelligence Advantages," but again
includes no corresponding decision or time line for action.

"The United States needs to enhance human intelligence capabilities and
tools not only to gather better HUMINT but also to enable better
positioning of technical collection systems," the report states. In
fact, in its three sentences on human intelligence, the QDR document
casts it as little more than one input among many to be gathered in a
commander's electronic array. "Human intelligence reporting must be
integrated into the situational awareness display that provides joint
forces with battlespace visualization through the Global Command and
Control System Common Operational Picture," according to the report.

Technology takes a prominent role in the QDR report's treatment of
"operational goals," including discussion of the threats posed by
advanced air defense systems, space capabilities, low-observable
unmanned platforms, anti-ship cruise missiles, advanced diesel
submarines, mobile ballistic missile systems, ground-based lasers and more.

While these advanced capabilities may indeed pose future threats,
fourth-generation warfare experts are quick to point out that the
immediate threat facing the Defense Department is low technology. Both
the terrorist attack on the Navy destroyer Cole almost one year ago and
the more recent catastrophes in New York and Washington saw perpetrators
turning what appeared to be harmless vessels into highly lethal weapons.

Fourth-generation terrorism -- operating somewhere at the intersection
between war and crime -- "seeks to use the enemy's strength against
him," stated the 12-year-old Gazette article. In this "judo" concept of
warfare, terrorists "use a free society's freedom and openness, its
greatest strengths, against it."

Indeed, the authors saw the potential that practitioners of
fourth-generation warfare, armed with high technology, might become all
the more lethal. The use of directed energy, robotics or advanced
communications systems could "offer a potential for radically altered
tactics," according to the article.

"At present, our research, development and procurement process has great
difficulty making [the] transition" toward effectiveness against
fourth-generation threats, the authors stated. "It often produces
weapons that incorporate high technology irrelevant in combat or too
complex to work in the chaos of combat. Too many so-called 'smart'
weapons . . . are easy to counter, fail of their own complexity, or make
impossible demands on their operators."

The QDR's section on research and development discusses needs related to
homeland defense -- among other operational goals -- but focuses almost
exclusively on defense against ballistic and cruise missiles, and
managing the aftermath of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, especially
those involving weapons of mass destruction.

While some might debate whether these are the key military elements in
preparing for fourth-generation wars, few would disagree that they are
at best just a start.

The QDR "has got some very bright points in it, but there's no way to
connect the dots," said one military official this week. "Not even the
events of 11 September could change the course of the QDR."

Another observer goes further in his critique. "It was clear by
midsummer that they had fallen way behind [in undertaking the QDR], and
that the reviews they did last spring had not panned out," says Franklin
Spinney, an outspoken Pentagon tactical air power analyst whose insights
on defense spending and military operations have attracted widespread
notice for decades. "Once the attacks occurred, the ballgame changed.
They could have gone to Congress and said, 'Look, we've got to sort this
thing out [and] you've got to give us more time. We're in the middle of
a war.'

"Instead," Spinney continued, "they bolted some platitudes about the
attack onto a bland document in order to meet a deadline."

How might the QDR have addressed this challenge differently? According
to Wilson -- who, like Spinney, was a prot�g� of late military
theoretician Air Force Col. John Boyd and a prolific writer on
fourth-generation warfare -- the essence of the military's response to
this new kind of threat lies primarily in people and operations. An
overreliance on technology will undermine U.S. efforts, which is the "a
seductive trap the Pentagon could fall into," he told ITP this week. He
said a Pentagon strategy to undertake a war on terrorism must:

* Be "geared to national grand strategy" and well integrated with
non-military elements of the strategy;

* Span "cultural, economic, political, social [and] military" spheres,
expanding and contracting as needed;

* Rapidly undermine the adversary's decision cycles;

* "Flatten" command and control to eliminate layers that could hamper
swift action; and

* Adapt to multiple environments.

The United States must seek to set the conditions of "where and when to
engage [foes] from a plural perspective, and where and when instead to
resist the temptation to 'do something,'" Wilson said. Forces should be
ready to fight deep, when necessary, using small, independent action
teams or special forces commandos. And the military should attempt to
shape the environment in several dimensions, including manipulating time
and space to friendly advantage, and using psychological operations or
deception, military surprises and political shocks.

"As a starting point, we will need to fully explore and define the
emerging operational environment," states Wilson in his forthcoming
article, written with Sgt. John Sullivan of the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department and Marine Corps Lt. Col. Hal Kempfer. "What are
its characteristics and boundaries, which are its actors, what means are
at their disposal and what are their corresponding capabilities and
intentions? This will help quantify risk (vulnerability relative to
threat) and provide insights into deterrence, containment and early
engagement of threats."

Emphasizing the importance of using human intelligence to discern
pertinent information from "noise," the authors add: "We must learn from
our past experiences to adapt and develop new intelligence applications
and approaches to these emerging and evolving threats at the
intersection of crime and war. And we must do so quickly because this
form [of] conflict is already here."

-- Elaine M. Grossman

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Pinpoint the right security solution for your company- Learn how to add 128- bit encryption and to authenticate your web site with VeriSign's FREE guide!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/yQix2C/33_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:FCC.OKs.Delayed.Deployment.Plans.for.E-911]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:FBI.Investigates.School.Bomb.Threats]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:54 PST